PhilPaine.com

There’s a com­mon belief, fos­tered in gen­tle soci­eties, where peo­ple expect their chil­dren to grow up, and famine nev­er stalks the land, that there is no such thing as absolute evil, and that dic­ta­tors are con­fused ide­al­ists who took a wrong turn. This, the first seri­ously researched and accu­rate biog­ra­phy of Mao Zedong, should dis­abuse any­one of such naiv­ité. I have spent most of my life­time study­ing the motives, ide­olo­gies, mech­a­nisms, and agents of slav­ery, but I was still not pre­pared for the con­tents of this book, which is one of the most impor­tant biogra­phies of mod­ern times. It is absolute­ly essen­tial that this book be in every library and school in the world, for Holo­caust Denial is the endem­ic sick­ness of our age, and the wor­ship of mass mur­der­ers the endem­ic sick­ness of all ages.

I remem­ber when col­lege cam­puses were adorned with posters of Mao, when Jean-Paul Sartre was pro­claim­ing that Mao’s “rev­o­lu­tion­ary vio­lence” was “pro­foundly moral”, when uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sors prat­tled the moron­ic, mega­lo­ma­niac slo­gans of Mao’s Lit­tle Red Book [“Pow­er comes from the muz­zle of a gun”] as if they were pro­found phi­los­o­phy, and a lawyer and fem­i­nist activist tried to slap me in the face when I told her that Mao was a geno­ci­dal crim­i­nal. I remem­ber when anoth­er stu­dent activist glee­fully showed me a pho­to­graph of one of Mao’s “projects” — thou­sands of ragged, starved, bru­tal­ized slaves dig­ging up earth with their bare hands while machine-gun-tot­ing Com­mu­nist Par­ty cadrés watched over them, smok­ing cig­a­rettes, barbed wire and wood­en watch­tow­ers clear­ly vis­i­ble in the back­ground. This, he explained, was the ide­al soci­ety, Utopia being con­structed for the com­mon good. This was not even the death camps or the lao­gai, mind you, of which no pic­tures where per­mit­ted to exist, but of one of the projects the Par­ty liked to pub­li­cize. And their cal­cu­la­tions were cor­rect. To the cam­pus intel­lec­tu­als in Paris, Berke­ley, or Toron­to, such pic­tures were appeal­ing. To any actu­al human being, they could not be any­thing but hor­ri­fy­ing and disgusting.

Now, to me, as I dis­cerned even as a child, it was inescapable fact that Mao was the great­est geno­ci­dal psy­chopath in human his­tory. In one year alone, he mur­dered between twen­ty and thir­ty mil­lion peo­ple, and even the most con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate of his total death count put him far ahead of Stal­in and Hitler combined.

But most dic­ta­tors show at least some signs of human­ity. They love their pets. They use their ide­o­log­i­cal schemes to jus­tify their crimes to them­selves, or they grow slow­ly into their roles as mon­sters from more nor­mal beginn­ings. Usu­ally they are squea­mish, and make sure they are insu­lated from actu­ally wit­ness­ing most the hor­rors they cre­ate. None of this with Mao. There was noth­ing in him, from the first we know any­thing about him, except the desire to cre­ate the max­i­mum of human suf­fer­ing, cre­ate the max­i­mum plea­sure for him­self, and destroy as much as he could of the world. Raised in com­fort and priv­ilege in a wealthy rur­al fam­ily, he showed from the beginn­ing, and at all times there­after, absolute con­tempt for peas­ants and the down­trod­den poor, and lat­er delight­ed in exter­mi­nat­ing them. As a young stu­dent, he laid out his phi­los­o­phy, which did not change one atom dur­ing his life­time: “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be ben­e­fit­ing oth­ers.… Peo­ple like me want to sat­isfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we auto­mat­i­cally have the most valu­able moral codes. Of course there are peo­ple and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.”

He soon found the atmos­phere of Com­mu­nist Par­ty, with it’s lim­it­less greed, bru­tal­ity, and treach­ery, con­ge­nial to his ambi­tions. The racist, geno­ci­dal teach­ings of Karl Marx have been the mother’s milk of most of the last century’s tyrants, and Mao delight­ed in using its tools with greater skill and ruth­less­ness than his many rivals. “The coun­try must be destroyed and then reformed.… This applies to the coun­try, to the nation, and to mankind.. The destruc­tion of the uni­verse is the same…People like me long for its destruc­tion, because when the old uni­verse is destroyed, a new uni­verse will be formed. Isn’t that bet­ter!”. He rose fast in the orga­ni­za­tion, by judi­ciously swin­dling, betray­ing, fram­ing, tor­tur­ing and mur­der­ing every­one who could con­ceiv­ably obstruct or com­pete with him. In a high­ly com­pet­i­tive orga­ni­za­tion of swindlers, betray­ers, framers, tor­tur­ers and mur­der­ers, this was real skill. He always knew were secu­rity was: in keep­ing in Stalin’s favour, and keep­ing the mon­ey flow­ing into his hands. Mao adored tor­ture, loved wit­ness­ing it direct­ly, and enthu­si­as­ti­cally added as many obscene and baroque details to its prac­tice as his fer­tile imag­i­na­tion could concoct.

The biog­ra­phy final­ly puts an end to the absurd myths gen­er­ated by Mao’s care­ful manip­u­la­tion of dumb jour­nal­ists like Edgar Snow and Simone de Beau­voir. The authors uncov­er the truth behind the imag­i­nary hero­ic bat­tles, the lies about egal­i­tar­i­an­ism, kind­ness to peas­ants and grass roots sup­port. Even before the Long March began, Mao’s Com­mu­nist forces had mur­dered a fifth of the pop­u­la­tion of the region they con­trolled, and reduced the rest to slave labour, under a regime of absolute ter­ror. The hero­ic war against the Japan­ese was anoth­er com­pletely imag­i­nary con­coc­tion. Mao’s Com­mu­nist force nev­er engaged in any fight­ing with the Japan­ese, except for one tiny skir­mish that hap­pened by acci­dent (and which made Mao furi­ous). Mao’s strat­egy was, indeed, to help the Japan­ese con­quest as much as he could. He was filled with admi­ra­tion for Stal­in and Hitler’s divi­sion of Poland when the Com­mu­nists allied with the Nazis. He want­ed to see Chi­na half-con­quered by Japan, so that the Sovi­ets would back him as ruler of the oth­er half. But the defeat of Japan by the Unit­ed States and its allies, and Stalin’s skill in fill­ing Chi­ang Kai-shek’s army with sleep­er dou­ble agents at the high­est lev­els, who sim­ply ordered their armies into ambush­es to be slaugh­tered, hand­ed Mao all of Chi­na on a platter.

From his vic­tory, onward, all the more famil­iar hor­rors unroll — the direct­ed famines, the count­less ter­ror cam­paigns, the Great Leap For­ward, the wars in which mil­lions died for obscure minor chess-moves of ambi­tion, the unbe­liev­able suf­fer­ing of the over­whelm­ing bulk of the Chi­nese Peo­ple in order to sup­port the palaces and priv­ileges of the Com­mu­nist Rich, the peas­antry squeezed into star­va­tion to pay for nuclear weapons, bribe for­eign rulers and fund the glob­al Cult of Mao, the attempt­ed destruc­tion of all Chi­nese art and cul­ture. And always, the tor­ture. Tor­ture used on a scale that bog­gles the mind of even the most cyn­i­cal stu­dent of his­tory. Tor­ture of the most incon­ceiv­able, arcane, cre­ative orig­i­nal­ity. Tor­ture, tor­ture, tor­ture, and more tor­ture, with Mao smack­ing his lips in delight at every new twist, every new improvement.

This book is his­tory. Hard, cold fact, chron­i­cled dis­pas­sion­ately from rig­or­ous schol­ar­ship. It tells the truth. If any­one can read this, and not grasp that evil exists, then they are pitiable fools.

A curi­ous foot­note: In his solip­sis­tic uni­verse, Mao had no inter­est or con­cern for oth­er human beings. His sev­eral chil­dren, for instance, were casu­ally aban­doned to starve, or shunt­ed into insti­tu­tions. Wives were tor­mented and aban­doned, and one lit­er­ally dri­ven insane. But there was one inter­est­ing excep­tion. In his old age, Mao dis­played a gen­uine sen­ti­men­tal feel­ing for one per­son, and lav­ished him with sin­cere praise and gifts: Richard Mil­hous Nixon.